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Friday, 8 February 2013

The Anti-Empire Report # 113 from William Blum

American Foreign Policy – Have our war lovers learned anything

Over the past four decades, of all the reasons people over a certain
age have given for their becoming radicalized against US foreign policy,
the Vietnam War has easily been the one most often cited. And I myself
am the best example of this that you could find. I sometimes think that
if the war lovers who run the United States had known of this in advance
they might have had serious second thoughts about starting that great
historical folly and war crime.

At other times, however, I have the thought that our dear war lovers
have had 40 years to take this lesson to heart, and during this time
what did they do? They did Salvador and Nicaragua, and Angola and
Grenada. They did Panama and Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and Iraq. And
in 2012 American President Barack Obama saw fit to declare that the
Vietnam War was “one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and
integrity in the annals of military history”. 1

So, have they learned nothing? When it comes to following
international law, is the United States like a failed state? The
Somalia of international law? Well, if they were perfectly frank, the
war lovers would insist that the purpose of all these interventions, and
many others like them, was to keep the atheists out of power – the
non-believers in America’s god-given right to rule the world – or to at
least make life as difficult as possible for them. And thus the
interventions were successful; nothing to apologize for; even the
Vietnam War achieved its purpose of preventing that country from
becoming a good development option for Asia, a socialist alternative to
the capitalist model; precisely the same reason for Washington’s endless
hostility toward Cuba in Latin America; and Cuba has indeed inspired
numerous atheists and their alternatives for a better world.

If they were even more honest, the war lovers might quote George
Kennan, the legendary State Department strategist, who wrote
prophetically during the Cold War: “Were the Soviet Union to sink
tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial
establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some
other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an
unacceptable shock to the American economy.” 2

But after all these years, after decades of American militarism –
though not a day passes without some government official or media
acolyte expressing his admiration and gratitude for “our brave boys” –
cracks in the American edifice can be seen. Some of the war lovers, and
their TV groupies would have us believe that they have actually learned
something. One of the first was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in
February 2011: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises
the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into
the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”

And here’s former Secretary of State George Shultz speaking before
the prestigious Council of Foreign Relations last month (January 29):
“Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be the template for how we go about”
dealing with threats of terrorism.

A few days earlier the very establishment and conservative Economist
magazine declared: “The best-intentioned foreign intervention is bound
to bog its armies down in endless wars fighting invisible enemies to
help ungrateful locals.”

However, none of these people are in power. And does history offer
any example of a highly militaristic power – without extreme coercion –
seeing the error of its ways? One of my readers, who prefers to remain
anonymous, wrote to me recently:

It is my opinion that the German and Japanese people only
relinquished their imperial culture and mindset when they were bombed
back to the stone age at the end of WWII. Something similar is the only
cure for the same pathology that now is embedded into the very social
fabric of the USA. The USA is a full-blown pathological society now.
There is no other cure. No amount of articles on the Internet pointing
out the hypocrisies or war crimes will do it.

So, while the United States is busy building bases and anti-missile
sites in Europe, Asia and Africa, deploying space-based and other
hi-tech weapons systems, trying to surround Russia, China, Iran and any
other atheist that threatens American world hegemony, and firing drone
missiles all over the Middle East I’m busy playing games on the
Internet. What can I say? In theory at least, there is another force
besides the terrible bombing mentioned above that can stop the American
empire, and that is the American people. I’ll continue trying to educate
them. Too bad I won’t live long enough to see the glorious
transformation.

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